It is always wise to treat with some caution the findings of those medico-social surveys which are based on questionnaires. It is also wise to be cautious in the interpretation of studies that examine populations from different social cultures, and cross-cultural questionnaires can be further confounded by language disparities. That said, the organisers, researchers and authors of the ESPAD report (The European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs), published last week, have gone to great pains to try to ensure that the findings reported from 26 different European countries are comparable across languages and cultures and valid for each country surveyed.
The findings in Ireland seem to be further validated by the responses of those in this country who work closely with young people and are not surprised by the data which place Irish teenagers near the top of the European league in terms of the use of tobacco, alcohol and certain illegal drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy. Validation is also available from certain other studies here which, while not always exactly comparable with the ESPAD study, indicate similar high levels of the use of tobacco and mind-altering substances by young people. It seems reasonable to accept, therefore, that Irish school-goers are more familiar than most (but not all) of their European peers with smoking and drinking and some drugtaking.
But the report's findings are more quantitative than qualitative and it is far from easy to draw from them conclusions that could lead to positive or preventive actions. Further research will be required to answer the most central of several questions thrown up by the report: why should Irish teenagers be more active in this area than many other Europeans of their age? Why should they drink more, or get more drunk (a social phenomenon which can now be seen on the streets of even small provincial towns at weekends) than kids in many other European countries? Why is it that the messages about the lethal hazards of cigarette smoking are either not getting through to them or are being ignored by them?
Speculation on these and other questions can be endless. Some have suggested that our young people lack a coherent value system. It can as easily be argued that they may be following parental example, or even that they are more vigourous than other European teenagers in rebelling against parental advice and behaviour. Adolescence has always been a problematic period for some of those who are trying to assert their own individuality, but the "normal" problems can be greatly and permanently compounded by the presence or use of addictive substances such as tobacco where the toll on health and life itself is not payable until much later in life than most teenagers can envisage or identify.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the geographic and socio-economic distribution of the schools in which the questionnaires were answered. The virtual absence from the findings of such "hard" drugs as heroin, which have so devastated whole communities in deprived urban areas, is remarkable. Also interesting in the Irish context is the predominance, in the young people's answers, of the negative consequences of drinking alcohol, notwithstanding the relatively high levels of drinking identified. No one, apparently, was able to note a positive consequence of drinking. And nobody appears to have been asked where the money came from to support the behaviours described.
The researchers deserve thanks for drawing attention to what is clearly a significant phenomenon. That they have raised more questions than identifiable solutions was bound to be the case, given the nature of the research they undertook. Further, more targeted research is now required so that speculation does not take over from information in determining what actions may be desirable or beneficial.